The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise quality as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
An ever-increasing number of relatively inexpensive, low power wireless data communication services, networks and devices have been made available over the past number of years, promising near wire speed transmission and reliability. Various wireless technology is described in detail in the IEEE 802.11 Standards, including for example, the IEEE 802.11a (1999) Standard and its updates and amendments, the IEEE 802.11g (2003) Standard, as well as the IEEE 802.11e, the IEEE 802.11n and the IEEE 802.11w Standards, all of which are collectively incorporated herein fully by reference. These standards have been or are in the process of being commercialized with the promise of increased accuracy and efficiency of data transmission, making them a strong competitor to traditional wired Ethernet and “802.11b” or “WiFi” 11 Mbps mobile wireless transmission standard.
Despite the advances in wireless communication technology, data that is transmitted via wireless communication systems sometimes fails to reach its destination in a proper manner, e.g., as a result of channel imparities, failure of network devices, power loss, etc. As a result, various techniques have been developed to monitor and account for data loss, and some of the most common such techniques utilize acknowledgement-based mechanisms. Generally, under acknowledgement-based mechanisms, when a transmitting station, referred to as an “originator,” transmits information to a receiving station, referred to as a “recipient,” and that information is properly received at the recipient, the recipient transmits an acknowledgement back to the originator, acknowledging proper receipt of that information. Therefore, if the originator transmits information to the recipient but does not receive an acknowledgment for that information, it may be inferred at the originator that the transmitted information was not received properly, and the originator may retransmit that information to the recipient.
Typically, originators and recipients communicate information using information units (e.g., frames, packets, and so on), and under traditional acknowledgement-based mechanisms, recipients separately acknowledge the receipt of each information unit. One issue associated with these traditional mechanisms that acknowledge separately each individual information unit is that they often lead to significant overhead that results in suboptimal performance, e.g., with respect to bandwidth utilization. This may be particularly problematic in wireless communication systems, in which bandwidth is often a scarce resource.
In order to address this issue, and to improve efficiency of bandwidth utilization, a block acknowledgement (BA) mechanism has recently been defined in the IEEE 802.11e Standard. Generally, the BA mechanism enables the recipient to acknowledge the receipt of multiple information units (or a “block” of information units) at the same time.